It declares that in foreign policy the government is not as limited by the Constitution as in domestic policy; it assigns enormous power to the President in the making of foreign policy…

Zinn then quotes the court’s majority opinion:

‘…The broad statement that the federal government can exercise no powers except those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and such implied powers as are necessary and proper to carry into effect the enumerated powers, is categorically true only in respect of our internal affairs…’

And Zinn concludes:

The court spoke of ‘the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations–a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress.’ And when it adds that this power ‘of course, like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the application provisions of the Constitution[,]’ we must remember that the Court had just declared that in foreign affairs the government was not subject to the restrictions of the Constitution as in domestic affairs!

As such, it should come to no surprise that the campaign rhetoric and policies coming out of the Trump administration fits the tried and true pattern. They were audacious enough to make such a broad and sweeping executive order. In fact, I would even speculate that they had their bases covered on being allowed to do so legally.

However, this time, with both Washington State and Minnesota suing the federal government on the grounds of economic damage and injury caused by the order in conjunction with an constitutionality argument, Judge Robart broke away from precedent. Judge Robart asked for evidence to support the executive order, which the Federal government could not supply. Instead, the Federal government challenged the authority of the Judicial Branch of the United States in reviewing decisions made by the Executive branch. Judge Robart quickly rebuffed such an argument.

The work of the court is not to create policy or judge the wisdom of any particular policy promoted by the other two branches.That’s the work of the legislative and executive branches, while it’s the work of the judiciary to ensure laws and executive orders comport with the Constitution. The court concludes that the circumstances brought before it today are such that it must intervene to fulfill its constitutional role in our tripart government.

While the legal battle over the travel ban specifically is not close to over and will continue to work its way through the legal process up to the Supreme Court, there is a different subtext that can possibly play out where a possible avenue for challenging the Executive Branch’s near monopoly on determining foreign policy and national security can be formed. For the first time in a while, a case is being presented to the court that individual states are able to challenge a near century long precedent in American governance and legal ruling that gives the President sole power to dictate foreign policy. (The irony being that such a challenge started with the Republicans challenging Obama’s executive authority in a previous court case.)

It would be hyperbolic to claim that even the most favorable decision would reign in the President’s ability to dictate foreign policy, but it would creak open the door that was once shackled shut. That small creak could grow wider if individual states leverage the argument of economic damage and injury with evidence of US foreign policy causing direct economic damage that is amplified by globalization. It might be a bit of a long shot and likely would require juxtaposing an unconstitutionality argument, but the fact that a U.S. state is able to successfully sue the Executive Branch on a foreign policy and security decision (though it’s blurred as being also a domestic issue since it deals with immigration) might be able to pave the way of reigning in the monopoly on foreign affairs.

Another interesting detail is the close relationships that businesses and universities from these states (that make up the economic back bone of the state) worked closely with their local government to establish a strong legal case. The companies that overwhelmingly opposed the ban were from industrial sectors that rely on highly skilled and educated individuals, which have an over-represented Asian workforce that are directly affected by the ban (e.g. tech). While issues of diversity in the workforce (even in high-tech) is a problem and should be addressed, it should be noted that this may be an emerging area of influence in dictating policy, especially in booming sectors like tech and engineering that are starting to become more affluent in politics.

These increasing diversity factors (using a high-skill labor lens only, for now) can further solidify that bridge of foreign decision making to domestic repercussion streamline. As such, this may further embolden individual municipalities and states to keep challenging the President’s foreign policy that disrupts constitutional guarantees and could continue to chip away at his ability to roll out his policy.

If he continues to be disruptive, he could not only lose his own ability to establish his foreign policy agenda without aberration, but also for other presidents to come.

So Israel and Palestine are at it. Again. I know this because Facebook told me. Perusing through various hashtags (#standwithIsrael, #prayforPalestine, and various other combinations of “slacktivism“) I came across an article regarding Ahmed al-Jabari, a senior commander of Hamas’ military wing. According to the article, Ahmed al-Jabari received a “draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel [and Hamas], when his car was blasted by the Israeli strike that killed him, Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin told Haaretz.”

Gershon Baskin – a co-chair of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information and chief negotiator of the secret back channel negotiations for Gilad Shalit‘s release – wrote a NYTimes Op-Ed piece regarding the assassination:

I believe that Israel made a grave and irresponsible strategic error by deciding to kill Mr. Jabari…Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency…On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt…

In the draft, which I understand Mr. Jabari saw hours before he was killed, it was proposed that Israeli intelligence information transmitted through the Egyptians would be delivered to Mr. Jabari so that he could take action aimed at preventing an attack against Israel. Mr. Jabari and his forces would have had an opportunity to prove that they were serious when they told Egyptian intelligence officials that they were not interested in escalation. If Mr. Jabari had agreed to the draft, then we could have prevented this new round of violence; if he had refused, then Israel would have likely attacked in much the same way as it is now…

Instead, Mr. Jabari is dead — and with him died the possibility of a long-term cease-fire. Israel may have also compromised the ability of Egyptian intelligence officials to mediate a short-term cease-fire and placed Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt at risk.

This was not inevitable, and cooler heads could have prevailed. Mr. Jabari’s assassination removes one of the more practical actors on the Hamas side.

If that nugget does not blow your mind, here is something “better”: Ahmed al-Jabari – paranoid about his own security – rarely carried a cell phone with him or any other electronic device that was tracable and rarely made public appearances. So how was he found? According to George Joffé, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Israel used a combination of technology and informers in order zero-in on al-Jabari’s location. He also opines that it must have been months in the planning, which seems to be the case, especially with the heavy aerial assault that followed, which destroyed strategically important targets. Therefore, if months of planning, following, and intelligence gathering were being consolidated, surely al-Jabari’s secret dealings were also exposed? If they were (which seems to be the case as non-military, non-secret parties were privy to the dealings), wouldn’t Israel have welcomed such negotiations and agreements to take root?

Sadly, the timing, planning, and precision of his assassination, which subsequently launched a full scale escalation by Israel, seems to hint at a different agenda. An agenda that doesn’t fall solely at the footsteps of Israel for it also falls at the footsteps of some strange bedfellows.

“Once upon a time, there were the Gaza Hamas and the Damascus Hamas. In the lead at the time was the Damascus Hamas, while the Gaza Hamas was subordinate to the former. The hierarchy was quite clear and the leaders had faces and names. The spiritual, religious Hamas leadership had its headquarters in Gaza. Sheik Ahmed Yassin set the tone then. Everyone knew his place, and each one knew what he had to do. However, Yassin was killed, the Damascus Hamas disintegrated and a leadership vacuum was created, but not for long. In walked Ahmed Jabari. Under his command, the Hamas military wing took over, pushing aside the political wing, something that could not have happened under Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

The chaos in Hamas and the lack of leadership capable of making tough decisions have led to a crisis in the organization. Under these circumstances, in the absence of control, anarchy reigns. It’s every man for himself and each does as he sees fit. Every armed militant is a hero. Every operative launching a Qassam rocket is a king. The Islamic Jihad raises its head and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) follow suit. These are relatively small organizations; however, the damage they cause is not in proportion to their size.”

Eldar goes on to articulate Hamas’ difficulty in keeping the smaller political groups such as Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in check and dealing with its own political vacuum and restructuring, which made it difficult for Hamas to impose to establish order in Gaza. This came to a head when the Secretary-General of the PRC was assassinated in March 2012, when Hamas’ muted reaction was seen as weakness to the PRC and Islamic Jihad’s “uncompromising ideal for armed struggle against Israel.” Eldar concludes that if Hamas do not re-radicalize, they risk being sidelined to the more radical groups or simply never being able to control Gaza, but:

“Under the current circumstances, disarming the militants and restoring law and order are far more difficult tasks than they were several years ago. And as matters now stand, there does not seem to be anyone in Hamas who can or wants to take such a brave step. There is no strong enough figure in Hamas these days endowed with genuine leadership skills and enjoying the unprecedentedly wide support required to make such a move. There is no one in Hamas today who is ready to pay the price of what is bound to be branded by the other organizations in Gaza as no less than infidelity and betrayal.”

Enter conflict analysis theory. In his book, The Functions of Social Conflict, Lewis Coser argues that in times of weak internal solidarity, despotism rises in order to meet the demand of war or external threat. By facing an external enemy, internal cohesion increases and through the reinforcement of ideals and norms and the purging of deviant ideals and members, control is established over the group. With these axioms in mind, I take Eldar’s conclusions a bit further and argue that certain political factions within Hamas desired to reestablish themselves as the very banner of Palestinian resistance (especially under an Islamic flag). In order to do so, they hung al-Jabari out to dry to purge any remnants of looking soft, gained a martyr in the process, and used al-Jabari’s death as a symbol that Israel has no intention of negotiating by killing Hamas’ chief negotiator between Israel and Gaza.

In other words, Hamas leaked that information intentionally to Israel, and Israel bit. But why would Israel comply in striking such a target and starting a major offensive? It’s argued that it’s an election year in Israel, and Netanyahu wants to show that he will not be idle as Hamas fires rockets into Israel’s south. He had been criticised for being a lame duck, but it seems for political points he has chosen to launch an offensive. However, it still doesn’t explain al-Jabari as a target even if Israel wanted to launch an offensive. His killing has no impact other than putting a halt to a peace treaty, and knowing that may put everything into perspective. Quite frankly, the evidence seems to support that factions at the top of Israel do not want to see this conflict to end for similar reasons as Hamas. They can maintain their stranglehold on power by scaring up votes when their national security is at risk. And so, Israel selectively targets those who are willing to broker a treaty (al-Jabari’s case) or cause harm and pain that will reinforce their enemy to continue to hate them, thus maintaining the cycle.

Conducting research is an interesting journey. It can even be an emotional rollercoaster at times. It is fun (at least for me) to see the hypotheses or worldviews I possess in regards to politics, society, etc. is supported by factual evidence. Although, sometimes doing research can completely discredit your beliefs as well. In the case of my last blog post, the journey of doing research uncovered an incorrectly held belief/opinion (once again).

What you saw in the last blog post still remains correct. Both Obama and Romney refuse to address or lower the exorbitant defense budget and they both do not address the giant subsidies the United States pays to special interests, which burns a hole in our national debt. However, my intention when I first wrote the blog was to add a third piece as well. I was going to write that both candidates have not put legislation (or proposed/supported legislation in the case of Romney) into place that addresses the economic fubar that got the entire country into the economic disaster we are currently in. Had I included that into the blog without doing the proper research, I would have been wrong.

The reality is that President Obama did address the horrific wall street practices that brought the United States economy to a near standstill (wiki of Dodd-Frank). In fact, he addressed it emphatically. And, if you’re a capitalist…excuse me…a smart capitalist, you will know how important the passing of this bill was and how important it was in stopping the bleeding of the American economy. If you don’t know, let me break it down:

When Bill Clinton acquired the presidency, he wanted to prove that he was a pro-business Democrat. So his administration began unraveling various government regulation that oversees wall street in the name making it easier for business to do…well…business.

The detrimental piece of legislation that allowed wall street to run wild was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed all derivatives to be unregulated and expressly forbade the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) from regulating it.

What are derivatives? — Wiki here, but the way Lawrence Lessig explains it is easier to understand:“Derivatives are assets whose value is derived from something else, where ‘something’ could mean literally anything. I could have a derivative that pays me if the price of gold falls below $1,000 … A derivative is just a bet entered into by two or more parties. The terms of the bet are limited only by the imagination of the parties … Derivatives serve a valuable purpose. As with any contract, [the] aim is to shift risk within a market to someone better able to carry it.

When derivatives became unregulated, there was no oversight to see if whether parties (bankers, investors, hedge funds, etc.) contracted/bound themselves to derivatives so risky that it became detrimental to the overall macroeconomic structure. This is precisely what happened with the mortgage bubble and collapse of 2008 (click the link!!), which subsequently caused financial firms to go under (Lehman Brothers) and caused General Motors to beg the government to bail them out because Wall St. would no longer let them borrow money for their bad business model.

As a result of all this, President Obama championed an overhaul of the deregulated financial sector of the United States and pushed Congress to pass a financial reform bill, which it did with Dodd-Frank. The most important piece to that bill is the Volcker Rule, which keeps banks (or an institution that owns a bank) from amassing too much risk and participating in hedges or derivatives that could be deemed too risky without having adequate insurance or capital to support those risks. It also prevents banks from engaging in investments that are not deemed to be in the interest of its clients (conflict of interest).

“As a result, this election offers American voters an unedifying choice. Many of The Economist’s readers, especially those who run businesses in America, may well conclude that nothing could be worse than another four years of Mr Obama. We beg to differ. For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive. And for all his shortcomings, Mr Obama has dragged America’s economy back from the brink of disaster, and has made a decent fist of foreign policy. So this newspaper would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.”

There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us of our (in)famous institutions that snap into action in providing disaster relief–especially in an election year. The blogosphere and web-pundits stormed in (pun intended) on each candidate’s record and positions on disaster relief and found the Romney/Ryan ticket having proposed 80% cuts in disaster relief funding. As online pundits argue over the pros and cons of such cuts, it touches upon one of the centerpieces of the election debate: Excessive spending and what to do about it.

“Even if all the available tax expenditures were closed in the most progressive manner possible, it would not raise enough revenue among high-income households to offset the tax cuts they would receive. This was true even when we adjusted the revenue estimates to allow for the impact of potential economic growth, and even when we gave the campaign a trillion-dollar mulligan by ignoring the cost of the corporate tax cuts.

As a result, we concluded that if Romney did not impose new taxes on savings and investments, the only way to finance his tax cut proposals and reach revenue neutrality was to raise taxes on households with income below $200,000.”

At this point, it might seem clear that subsidies have to go, but here lies the conflict. Unfortunately, neither president nor nominee can simply slash subsidies completely tomorrow. There are many businesses, small to large, that are tied up in government subsidies and not allowing them time to transition their business models to seek revenue away from subsidies would cause a whole lot of people to lose their jobs and prices on food and fuel to skyrocket. In essence, it would be like implementing Iranian policies on the United States–not very smart.

The solution would be a long-term plan that must be designed to withstand successive presidents. It would have to be strategic in addressing concerns of rising costs that could be associated with subsidy cuts, which is usually addressed by lowering tariffs for cheaper imports. The money saved by subsidies can be reinvested in burgeoning sectors such as green technologies, high-tech services, and education to create a workforce that can support the demand for such positions.

Such a policy creates jobs, creates the workforce to perform those jobs, and saves the government a lot of money on waste. Cutting subsidy expenditures also allows proposals for tax cuts to actually be feasible by offseting the lost revenue caused by said tax cuts.

Unfortunately, that’s perhaps political suicide for both candidates as their campaigns rely on the contributions of those who benefit from subsidies. In other words, our tax dollars go to companies that pay candidates money to never address this problem. This hits on another issue of campaign finance reform, but that might be addressed in a different blog or you can read Lessig’s book (highly recommended).

In the meantime, we’re left with two politicians that blow harder than Sandy ever could.

On a june weekend I took part in a class workshop lead by TechChange, an organization that is dedicated to utilizing information and communication technology for positive social change. The workshop familiarized students, including myself, with various technological tools that are currently being used to support various weakened institutions around the world, such as crisis response & management, health response, education, and governance to name a few.

Two technological tools that we got to acquire hands on experience was FrontlineSMS and CrowdMap, which helped facilitate communication and information during election monitoring and medical emergency simulations. The tools utilize SMS (text messaging) – the predominant source of communication in even the most remote and/or underdeveloped regions of the world – and leveraging them to aid in some kind of monitoring or crisis management capacity.

Aside from monitoring tools, new innovative uses of ICT technology are helping to leverage and/or support governance in regions where it has been primarily absent. Tools like FrontlineSMS:Legal and the Internet Bar Organization’s Internet Silk Road Initiative help extend the reach of formal state legal institutions to the remotest of areas. This is particularly useful in places like the remote mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan’s northwest frontier where formal state penetration is limited. When disputes arise, citizens residing in these areas can call or text their dispute to a legal authority connected to this “mlegal” technology, which can help facilitate various legal needs such as discovery, facilitation, or representation just to name a few. Furthermore, these projects can also work with informal justice systems that may have greater legitimacy in a region. In the case of Afghanistan, working with Jirgas can provide greater legitimacy, collaboration, and enforcement on legal decisions made by formal and informal judges and juries.

However, questions do arise on how one monitors and maintains the enforcement of decisions made on legal disputes. In remote regions, monitoring is very difficult and having adequate witnesses may pose a problem in remote locations. In the case of Afghanistan, if state institutions are so remote, enforcement will require greater cooperation from jirgas – a community of tribal elders that specifically addresses disputes in the community. This can pose a problem as jirgas are not monitored and may become privy to dubious dealings. In other words, there is no regulatory system or body to help maintain the jirgas honesty.

Also, the technologies that were supposed to aid and support governance seemed limited to institutions. While institutions are important, they cannot function correctly without having a strong civil society. Aisha Ghaus-Pasha presents an excellent case on the role of civil society and how it promotes “good governance like transparency, effectiveness, openness,
responsiveness, and accountability.” (page 3) Therefore, it would be very interesting to see how technology can aid in the strengthening of civil society and create better relations and cooperation between civil society and formal state institutions.

The overall experience of being part of the TechChange workshop was quite eye-opening. It brought me face-to-face to many technologies that are simply daring to create change. Obviously, technology is not the answer to social woes and the organization makes no case that it does. However, they do argue that technology can certainly help and that it is simply daring to create positive social change as best it can through feedback and trial and error.